The 4 Day Week UK Campaign: Confronting Employees to a New Work Routine with the Evidence from a Large-Scale Pilot Study

It was easy for the managing director of a firm in London to convince her team to work fewer hours.

Losey said her team has hit its stride after going through a very difficult journey to convince her board. She said she is 80% sure everyone will keep the routine after November, when the trial ends.

Unity is one of 70 companies in the United Kingdom participating in the trial. For six months in June and July, more than 3,300 employees agreed to work 80% of their usual hours for the same rate of pay if they promised to deliver 100% of their usual work.

The program is being run by the nonprofit organization 4 Day Week Global; Autonomy, a think tank; and the 4 Day Week UK Campaign, in partnership with researchers from Cambridge University, Oxford University and Boston College.

New ways of working are becoming commonplace. Hybrid arrangements are well-established at many companies (even as some C.E.O.s are finding success getting staff back to the office more regularly). But another experiment is gaining traction: Not one of 33 companies that piloted a four-day workweek for six months as part of a large-scale study this year said they would return to a standard schedule. The firms, with more than 900 employees, reported higher revenue and employee productivity. Dozens of companies have been signed up by the advocacy group that coordinated the 4 Day Week Global pilot programs.

For Gary Conroy, founder and CEO of 5 Squirrels, a skincare product manufacturer on England’s south coast with 13 full-time employees, the new work routine gets “better and better all the time,” he told CNN Business.

Fat Losey: New habits that make her team happier, healthier, and happier than before she left her job in the aftermath of a pandemic

“We’ve all lost a lot of weight…we were overweight before,” he said. “[The team has] more time to prepare food, [eat] healthily. Lots of people are going to the gym a lot more.”

Losey said that her team is much more inspired and creative than her clients, who are happy with their performance after four months. A study at the company showed that productivity was up and that staff said they were feeling better.

She claimed that her clients are desperate for the experiment to succeed so they can convince their bosses to adopt it at work.

In a survey of more than 12,000 workers in the US, Gallup found that engagement in their jobs was not affected by whether they worked a four day week or not.

Schor said that it makes for happier and healthier employees. That’s especially important given the demands of the pandemic pushed many to simply burn out.

“Americans are finding that two days is not enough for the weekend. They can’t get all of their errands and family care [done] and taking their kids to activities, and even just a little bit of time for themselves, and preparing for the work week,” she said. “All of that gets crammed into two days and it’s just not enough.”

She said the first week was Armageddon, with too few colleagues available to respond to a client emergency. She cried while sitting on the kitchen floor.

Slowly, the team has adapted, and introduced new habits that have made all the difference. Now, internal meetings are capped to 15 minutes, and client meetings to 30 minutes. Emails to colleagues are not allowed to exceed more than a quarter of a day’s total emails.

Losey has a system to reduce distraction in the office. Colleagues have a light on their desk, and set it to green if they are happy to talk, amber if they are busy but available to speak, and red if they do not want to be interrupted.

Conroy said he has introduced “deep work time” where, for two hours every morning and two hours every afternoon, his staff ignore emails, calls or instant messages and concentrate on their projects.

His team has even started unplugging the office phones, as they were too distracting. He said clients were initially bothered, but have since responded with more emails.

The jobs site Indeed reported in 2021 that 61 percent of remote workers and 53 percent of on-site workers found it more difficult to “unplug” from work during off hours than before the pandemic began. Nearly 40 percent of all workers said they check emails outside of regular work hours every day. It is a fad that is mostly a fake idea, and the kind of thing that the online community likes to have something to talk about. Worker productivity has not really decreased. Yet Thompson also says that the neologism is a stand-in for more essential “chronic labor issues, such as the underrepresentation of unions or a profound American pressure to be careerist.”

Something has to give when a careerist culture and a digital revolution meet. American workers tend to think that something is not work demands but the human soul. The rise of digital technology requires us, as a culture, to re-examine what it means for work to be humane. As we do so, we stand on the shoulders of those who came before us in the labor movement. They offer us a model for how to begin this re-examination.

When Philip Schaff, a 19th-century Swiss German theologian, immigrated to the United States, he was impressed by the ability of ideologically disparate religious groups to collaborate politically to solve social ills. For Schaff and many others, a key issue in the burgeoning industrialist economy of the North was the preservation of time for worship, rest and family life to preserve the dignity of the worker. They looked to Sabbath laws, in part, to help achieve this. Schaff stressed that keeping the Sabbath wasn’t merely a religious observance but served a civic function. Through time, it was possible to treat workers as valuable humans, so that they can live their entire lives.

Increasing the Green Economy: A Report from Wall Street and Venture Capitalists on Climate Change, and Recent Progress in the Combat against Child Poverty

Wall Street and venture capitalists are bullish on green tech, too. In his year-end letter, Bill Gates notes that climate-related R. & D. has grown nearly a third since the 2015 Paris accords. Over the past two years private capital investment in the sector has been up by $70 billion. New technologies are coming up to address climate issues. In November, Larry Fink made a prediction at the DealBook Summit that venture funding would go to start-ups that tackle the world’s biggest problems. The money will be changing where it goes, according to the man. It is not going to go to the things that gave us utility to get food quicker or to find a taxi sooner.

Bots probably won’t take your job — and could make it easier. Fears that technology will replace human workers are as old as technology, and they were raised once again in November when a company called OpenAI released ChatGPT, an automated writing program. But AI experts have long insisted that such technologies have limitations that prevent them from fully replacing humans. grunt work can be made easier by the bots. One example that went viral shortly after ChatGPT’s release: A Palm Beach doctor posted a video of himself dictating a letter to an insurance company.

There is real progress in the battle against child poverty. The number of children in America living below the poverty line has plummeted by 59 percent since 1993. As The Times’s Jason DeParle reported in September, “child poverty has fallen in every state, and it has fallen by about the same degree among children who are white, Black, Hispanic and Asian, living with one parent or two, and in native or immigrant households.” Changes to welfare laws make it easier for people with limited income to apply for assistance programs.

Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/12/24/business/dealbook/optimisim-in-2023.html

Why Are We Doing This To Ourself? An Observation of the Recent Progress on Vaccines for Skin Cancer and Other Cancers

We’re getting closer to cancer vaccines. Researchers think that it’s possible to cure cancer in people who are already showing signs of it by immunizing them with vaccine. They made little progress until recently and promising results from preliminary studies are giving some doctors hope. Moderna said this month that a skin cancer vaccine performed well in midstage trials. Moderna and others are working on dozens of other vaccines to treat various other cancers.

Editor’s Note: Jill Filipovic is a journalist based in New York and author of the book “OK Boomer, Let’s Talk: How My Generation Got Left Behind.” Follow her on social media. The opinions expressed in this commentary are solely her own. You can check out more opinion on CNN.

American work life has changed in the last few decades. Many jobs have become more desk-bound thanks to technology. Automation has replaced many forms of manual labor. There are more women in the workforce than at any point during American history, which is a testament to the quality of work they do.

technological innovations have made us more tied to machines and devices while also threatening to take over our creative works. Why are we doing this to ourselves?

Source: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/31/opinions/maryland-bill-four-day-workweek-filipovic-ctrp/index.html

Work Hours in Maryland: Three Years since the Psyvour of Work Life and Life-Life in the 21st Century and Where We Are Today

If the proposed Maryland bill becomes law, researchers and policymakers will get more information about shorter workingweeks and hopefully it will help policymakers craft better policies that keep the US economically competive while also shifting cultural norms toward a healthier relationship to work.

But that fear may very well be misplaced. I am a sample size of one, and as a freelancer my hours are all over the place but I will often at least try to schedule out my week. I am doing four full days instead of five partial ones. Creating these boundaries around my working hours means that I am much more focused and efficient; I spend less time perusing social media or doing non-work tasks so that I can enjoy the reward of a free Friday.

It has been three years since the beginning of the Psyvour that upended work life and life-life. We are living in an era in which out-of-work demands, most especially parenting and other forms of caregiving, are more extreme than ever. And we are living in a country that, unlike other nations, provides meager support as its people strive to balance it all: a slim majority of Americans and a strong majority of workers still get health insurance from our employers, there is no universal childcare on offer and we have no guaranteed paid parental leave – let alone enough sick days or vacation that we are empowered to take, even when offered them.